Flux

For those of you tired of running, riding, flying, and even taking a boat from one place to another. There are much faster ways to get around the World of Warcraft. Let’s take a look at the known like hearthstones and others that are more rare like a Dimensional Ripper or the Blessed Medallion of Karabor.

Basics

Everyone is probably already familiar with the two easiest ways to instantly get around, Hearthstones and Summoning Stones. Hearthstones bring you back to Inns and Summoning Stone with the help of two others brings you to the entrance of instances. Hearthstones are by far one of the most useful ways to get around but they have a 1 hour cooldown.

Abilities

Some characters have special abilities that let them quickly transport themselves or others in their group.

Mages can teleport themselves or open a portal for the entire group to any major city in their faction. That’s Ironforge, Storm Wind, Exodar, Darnassus, Theramore, Shattrath for Alliance. And it’s Ogrimmar, Undercity, Silvermoon, Thunderbluff, Stonard, Shattrath for Horde. The mage teleport is one of the most useful ways to get around.

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Are you out of bag and bank space? Have you made an extra character just to hold all your loot and crafting supplies? Consider getting yourself a personal guild bank. Since patch 2.3 every guild gets a bank for free. This is in addition to your own character bank. By making a new guild for yourself you get easy storage. Usually you will want an alternate to be in charge of your personal guild bank. This way your main character is free to join whatever guild they want. You can also invite your friend’s or significant other’s alternate characters to your banking guild to share items as well, or just keep it all for yourself.

The advantage to having your own guild bank is that you have more storage without having to spread out your items between several different characters. And you can share items with friends. It’s far easier to keep track of than multiple banks and it gives you more options.

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Mages have the best crowd control in the game using the Polymorph spell. The spell effects humanoids and beasts which make up most of the creatures in WoW. A mage polymorphs creatures into sheep by default. But with research they can use two other forms, Pigs and Turtles. There is no advantage to using one form over another, only the appearance changes. But George Orwell would be proud.

The Sheep

This is what mages normally prefer. Why, we aren’t sure. But we do know there are 4 ranks which increase the duration and the mana cost. Get the highest rank, it’s shearly worth it.

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There are tips and tricks that make WoW more enjoyable. Let’s take a look at some.

Canceling Flights

Have you ever hoped on a Gryphon or Wyvern and suddenly realized that you need to go to a different place? Maybe you misclicked or maybe your group suddenly decided to go somewhere else. Flights can be long and frustrating, especially when you are going to the wrong place. There is a way to cancel your flight. Logout, then log back in. You will have to complete the first leg, but now you will automatically stop at the first flight point you come to instead of continuing past each one. Of course, this doesn’t work if you went to a destination one stop away. But in that case, it’s a short trip anyway.

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You can significantly speed up WoW on Windows with a simple setting. Awhile ago a number of people figured out that if you run windows media player at the same time, the game runs faster! Unbelievable as this sounds, it’s true. And it is because media player tells Windows to use different timings which can be better for WoW. This works especially well on older or multicore computers but seems to help just about anyone if only just a little. You may see your load times go down and your frames per second go up.

Media Player essentially changes your thread scheduler timings using a windows API. This effects every program running on your computer. This tweak is fairly well known in other games and among server admins, but it was just discovered or rediscovered to work for WoW.

If you don’t care to run media player, or want to have all your computer resources available for WoW. You can directly configure WoW to act similarly using a special command.

Go to your chatline in the game and type either of these commands. Then, restart your game.
/console timingmethod 1
/console timingmethod 2

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Often there is a choice of which item to upgrade first. For example, do you get the most out of updating your head slot item or your shoulder item? At first, this will be fairly easy to answer. You just upgrade the one that is the worst quality. For example, get rid of your greens for blues and then purples. And secondly upgrade your item level.

We have talked about gearing up, quality and item levels previously.

But as all your items start to become the same quality and roughly the same level this becomes harder to decide. A third way to help you decide is to know how Blizzard spends points on itemization.

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	Class	Ability	Icons	Time	Breaks	Resist	Targets	Creature	Cooldown
Primary	Mage	Polymorph		50	yes	arcane	one	humanoid, beast	0
	Hunter	Freezing Trap		20-26	yes	yes	one	any	24-30
	Rogue	Sap		25-45	yes	no	one	humanoid	special
	Priest	Mind Control		60	caster	yes	one	humanoid	0
	Warlock	Seduction		15	yes	shadow	one	humanoid	0
Limited	Druid	Hibernate		40	yes	yes	one	beast, dragonkin	0
	Druid	Entangling Roots		27	no	yes	one	any outdoors	0
	Priest	Shackle Undead		50	yes	yes	one	undead	0
	Warlock	Enslave Demon		300	no	shadow	one	demon	0
	Warlock	Banish		30	no	shadow	one	demon,elemental	0
Emergency	Druid	Cyclone		6	no	no	one	any	0
	Hunter	Wyvern Sting		12	yes	yes	one	any	120
	Mage	Frost Nova		8	partial	frost	all ranged	any	21-25
	Paladin	Turn Undead		20	no	yes	one	undead	30
	Paladin	Hammer of Justice		6	no	no	one	any	45-60
	Priest	Psychic Scream		8	no	no	5	any	30
	Rogue	Blind		10	yes	yes	one	any	90-120
	Warlock	Fear		20	no	yes	one	any	0
	Warlock	Howl of Terror		8	no	no	5	any	40
	Warrior	Intimidating Shout		8	no	no	6	any	180

For most instance creatures you have to use some sort of crowd control or your group makes a quick visit to the graveyard. Who decides crowd control usually falls on the puller, often the tank, though anyone familiar with it can do it. That person usually has rough idea of what’s what and uses the raid target icons, , to mark the creatures before the pull and fighting starts.

We talked before about easy ways to mark mobs with hot keys and mods.

What gets crowd controlled (cc) and what doesn’t is mostly about knowing the mob and your group’s cc. It’s also a part art depending on how strong you feel your party is and how safe you need to play it.

Ask yourself what is your group’s cc, the target creature type, the creature’s abilities, and what is the kill order going to be. In practice this is pretty easy once you know the mob and know about cc abilities.

Crowd Control Abilities

Crowd control abilities come in many different flavors. Officially these are Charm, Daze, Disorient, Fear, Incapacitate, Root, Sleep, Slow, Snare, and Stun. But this isn’t very useful for deciding when to use them. So we have listed the crowd control abilities in three different groups assuming maximum level and rank .

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Usually when going through an instance someone gets the lucky job of marking the creature mobs for kill order and cc. It is a critical job but it is repetitive and surprisingly difficult with the default UI. You have to select each creature one at a time, right click on their portrait, and then mouse through two menus to select a symbol for it. This is tolerable most of the time but it becomes a real problem for mobs that spawn in quickly before you can mark. For example, the hallway in Mechanar leading up to Pathaleon the Calculator spawns in six mobs one after another giving you very little time to mark anything. Often confusion takes over, sheeps break, tanks run around like headless chickens, and the party wipes.

While you don’t always have time to mark them all, you do have time to mark one or two critical ones, if you use hotkeys or a mod. Mods are better for the mouse inclined and the hotkeys for keyboarders. Let’s take a look at how to setup the hotkeys.

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